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bestow it so freely " (The Life, 1784), is twice adopted, once in reference to some utterances of Byron's own, related with too great prolixity to Leigh Hunt, and secondly in a letter to Murray, deprecating the "insolent condescension" of English public opinion.

Sometimes Byron contrives to pack two Johnsonian quotations into a single letter. Thus, writing to Gifford, he says, "It is not for me to bandy compliments with my elders and my betters. . . . I am no Bigot to Infidelity "the first of these confessions alluding to Johnson's account of his first interview with George III. (The Life, 1767), where the Doctor, repudiating the idea of replying to a compliment paid him by the king, remarks, "When the king had said it, it was to be so. It was not for me to bandy civilities with my sovereign"; the second making reference to a rebuke administered by Johnson to a Presbyterian minister, Mr Kenneth M'Aulay, who, persisting in "a rhapsody against creeds and confessions" (The Tour, 1773, August 27th), received the following answer, "Sir, you are a bigot to laxness." Similarly, in one of the few letters he addressed to the Earl of Blessington, talking of the ill effects wrought by applying caustic to a wart on his face, Byron writes, "The peccant part and its immediate environ are as black as if the printer's devil had marked me for an author.

Out, damn'd spot,' I saw that during my visit it had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished"; obviously alluding in the first place to the humorous reply which Johnson made to Boswell in a discussion of the virtues of medicated baths (The Life, 1769, October 26th), "Well, sir, go to Dominicetti, and get thyself fumigated; but be sure that the steam be

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directed to thy head, for that is the peccant part"; and in the second place, to a conversation (The Life, 1783, May 15th), in which Johnson and Boswell quote and condemn the famous vote of the House of Commons, "That the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished"—an opinion which Byron also mentions in his "Detached Thoughts" as highly applicable to his own melancholy.

Occasionally-as in the letter just spoken ofByron quotes Johnson without making any acknowledgment of the obligation. Thus the remark he enters in his Journal for December 5th, 1813, on hearing that his rhymes are very popular in the United States, "These are the first tidings that have ever sounded like Fame to my ears-to be redde on the banks of the Ohio," is plainly inspired by Johnson's speech at the Essex Head Club (The Life, 1784, May 15th), "Oh, gentlemen, I must tell you a very great thing. The Empress of Russia has ordered 'The Rambler to be translated into the Russian language: so I shall be read on the banks of the Wolga. Horace boasts that his fame would extend as far as the banks of the Rhone; now the Wolga is farther from me than the Rhone was from Horace." And when, writing on the same date in his Journal, he criticises Madame de Staël in the words, "She always talks of myself or herself, and I am not (except in soliloquy, as now) much enamoured of either subject," he is merely paraphrasing Johnson's angry reply to one of Boswell's impertinent questions (The Life, 1766, May), "Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both." Similarly Byron's praise of Junius, "I like him; -he was a good hater," is a bold appropriation of

Johnson's eulogy of Dr Bathurst as related by Mrs Piozzi in her "Anecdotes":"Dear Bathurst was a man to my very heart's content: he hated a fool, and he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig; he was a very good hater." And the advice offered to Moore, "Don't talk of decay, but put in for eighty," is an imitation of Johnson's counsel to his old college friend, Edwards of Pembroke (The Life, 1778, April 17th), "Come, sir, drink water, and put in for a hundred." Perhaps, too, Byron's bon-mot, "The Cardinal is at his wit's end; it is true that he had not far to go," may have been suggested by what Johnson said at General Paoli's, when Boswell affirmed that Garrick seemed to "dip deep into his mind" for a certain reflection (The Life, 1776, April 11th), "He had not far to dip, sir; he had said the same thing, probably, twenty times before."

Mention of Garrick reminds me that Byron's Letters contain two further references to what Johnson said of Davy. The first occurs in a letterwritten to Moore-which gives a description of the first night of Mrs Wilmot's tragedy, "Ina." Byron says, "The fifth--what Garrick used to call (like a fool) the concoction of a play-the fifth act stuck fast at the King's prayer," and the corresponding passage in Boswell may be found in the account of that discussion at Sir Joshua Reynolds's, in the course of which Johnson told Garrick (The Life, 1778, April 9th) that a reverend gentlemen had complained to him that in rejecting a tragedy of his (that is, the clergyman's) the actor-manager had asserted that the "play was wrong in the concoction." The second is made in "Extracts from a Diary,"

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where Byron, concerned about the threatened piratical production of Marino Faliero, points out that the tragedy "is too regular" for the English stage, and contains "no surprises, no starts, nor trap-doors, nor opportunities for tossing their heads and kicking their heels,"" thereby introducing the complaint which Johnson made of the alterations Garrick wished to effect in "Irene," in order the better to fit the tragedy for the stage (The Life, 1749, Feb. 6th): "The fellow wants me to make Mahomet run mad, that he may have an opportunity of tossing his hands and kicking his heels.

Sayings of Johnson which may be described as apothegms are frequently met with in these Letters. Thus, writing to Rogers about an attack made on himself in a book called Sir Proteus, Byron takes a phrase used by Johnson (The Life, 1780) in ridicule of a newspaper letter which abused Reynolds and himself, and asks, "Are we alive after all this censure?" (Johnson's phrase is "satire"). Byron's contention that "God will not always be a Tory, though Johnson says the first Whig was the Devil," is, of course, an allusion to the famous retort delivered by the Doctor (The Life, 1778, April 28th) against the definition of a Tory given by Mr Eld-the Staffordshire Whig. Again, in the introduction to "My Dictionary," Byron quotes Johnson's proverb, "Hell is paved with good intentions" (The Life, 1772), while in one sentence of a letter addressed to J. J. Coulmann-"I cannot accept what it has pleased your friends to call their homage, because there is no sovereign in the republic of letters" he seems to be thinking of the remonstrance which Goldsmith made (The Life, 1773, May

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7th) against Boswell's habit of giving Johnson "the honour of unquestionable superiority"-"Sir, you are for making a monarchy of what should be a republic."

In three or four places Byron quotes well-known anecdotes from the Life. Thus he tells the story of Kit Smart's ninety-nine years' contract to the Universal Visitor (The Life, 1775, April 5th) as a jocular warning to Moore against engaging himself to Murray as a magazine-editor. He invokes the passage in which Johnson returns an approving verdict on Prior's Paulo Purgante (The Life, 1777, September) in vindication of Don Juan's impugned morality. Protesting against the praises given to "that little dirty blackguard Keats, in the Edinburgh," he says (though in slightly altered language), what Johnson himself said (The Life, 1763) when he heard that Thomas Sheridan had been granted a pension, “What, have they given him a pension? Then it is time for me to give up mine." And at the commencement of his "Extracts from a Diary" he illustrates his favourite joke of the strange progress of literature-from the bookseller's shop or the reader's table to the pastry-cook's counter or the trunk-maker's linings-by telling two stories, one of a grocer, a witness in a current murder trial, who was reported to have wrapped up some bacon and cheese for the prisoner in pages torn out of Pamela; and the other that malicious tale, told against Richardson by Boswell and appended in a note to one of Mr Bennet Langton's "Johnsoniana," of the gentleman lately returned from Paris who refused to pander to the great author's vanity by telling for the second time how he had seen Clarissa lying on the king's brother's table.

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